King and Lionheart
by JennyBunny65
Summary: The world is different since Steve Rogers went under the ice, but some things never change.


**Author's Note: I'm back! I mean tot post this last week, but you know how real life can be. Just some housekeeping notes: I don't own the Avengers, though they are on my Christmas list. The title of this fic comes from the Of Monsters and Men song "King and Lionheart," which is a beautiful little song that can apply to any ship and that you should really listen to. As always, I adore every review, and I hope you enjoy! I have another little one-shot I'll probably post before the next story in my on-going series is ready to start posting. Enjoy!**

Steve Rogers grew up in a different era. It was a time of World War, of genocide, a world where he was chosen by a secret government sect that wanted to make him a superhuman, only so he could fight _another_ secret government sect led by _another_ superhuman who was harnessing alien energy to take over the world.

In short, the past was a much simpler time.

He didn't have all this _technology_ growing up. He wasn't pressured to be connected to everyone, all the time, always plugged in and wasting his life on status updates and "tweets" (whatever those were – Steve had a suspicion it didn't refer to birds).

When he was a kid, America was the greatest country in the world, a country of _dreams_ and _opportunities_, a country where every home flew their flag proudly. Now America had lost its sheen, becoming disillusioned, ungrateful, overweight. Teens barely deigned to stand for the pledge, too wrapped up in their own narcissism to care about the environment, or the government, or anything that didn't involve a computer screen and cat photos.

At least at SHIELD, Steve still belonged – the soothing rhythm of military life was a welcome relief, if he didn't consider his reason for returning to the ranks (all because of that HYDRA cube they'd fished out of the ocean, and now some alien was gunning for world domination, and hadn't these people learned _anything_ in the last seventy years?).

There was, all in all, only one truly glaring difference: frat regs. Or rather, how people handled them.

When Steve had joined the few and the proud (though admittedly, he hadn't been a Marine, but why were Marines the only ones who could take pride in their job?), the rules had been very clear. Your commanders are not your friends. Your peers are not an option romantically. Too-close ties got you killed, compromised you in the field, and while they couldn't stop friendships – brotherhoods – from forming, they sure as heck could stop over-amorous soldiers from bed-hopping. Admittedly, what with the social stigma attached to homosexuality and the limit number of military women, this problem hadn't occurred very often in Steve's day. The closest Steve had ever come to breaking this rule was with Peggy – might have, too, if he hadn't crashed his plane or had realized sooner that fondue didn't extend beyond warm cheese. The first time Steve could remember seeing a flagrant disregard for frat regs was in the curious case of Clint and Natasha.

He had seen them together once or twice before the Loki incident, around SHIELD base. They were partners, he knew, and the most successful team SHIELD had ever put together. Steve had heard a lot about the two agents – most of which he chalked up to rumor and gossip – because as easy as it was to remain ignorant about internet trends like twerking (no, he didn't know, and no, he wasn't going to ask), you couldn't walk two feet around base without hearing their names.

Black Widow was former KGB, supposedly, and a wildly notorious assassin known for her beauty (which she used to lure men to their deaths, like her spidery namesake). She'd gone rogue from whatever had replaced the KGB after the USSR fell, burning through Europe like a wildfire until one Clint "Hawkeye" Barton had tracked her down, cornered her, and flipped her to the side of the angels.

The Hawk's past was no less colorful – orphaned at a young age, he and his brother had joined the circus to survive (which hadn't seemed so incredible to Steve but then, things like circuses had been more popular in _his_ New York), giving Barton the means to hone his particular affinity with a bow and arrow. After the circus split under mysterious circumstances (it had been redacted from SHIELD files), Barton had taken to free-lance work as an assassin. Steve, like most of SHIELD, was more than a little curious as to how _that_ happened: how does a kid go from being an entertainer to a killer like that? That kind of transformation doesn't happen overnight.

Then Coulson had found Barton and brought him in, and when the Black Widow showed up, he took her under his wing as well, as the handler of the most impressive team SHIELD had ever seen.

That was all common knowledge. The rest was myth, heck, even legend – Hawkeye and Black Widow were practically superheroes to the other agents, practically gods.

But at the end of the day, they were just mortals, with mortal failings, like Steve and Tony and Bruce and Thor _all_ were, underneath the hype. Romanoff and Barton were just better at hiding it than most.

The first time Steve caught a glimpse into that hidden world that Natasha often occupied, he was on the Helicarrier. Bruce was in his lab, Fury was stalking around importantly, and Coulson was making come-hither eyes at him from across the control room (and Steve was seriously hoping he'd gotten worse at reading people since he went under, because he didn't know how to deal with Agent Coulson's obvious adoration of him). Steve, useless when it came to all the scanning and programming and Googling that made up the Step One of the Tesseract's recovery, stood apart from it all, resisting the urge to twiddle his thumbs or whistle. He desperately wanted to help, of course, but his skill set really pertained more to physical battles than all this…

You guessed it. Technology.

"Bored yet, Captain?" came the voice from behind him, and Steve flinched a little because he was still a bit rusty. In his defense, he _had_ been frozen for the last few decades, so he thought the twitch could be forgiven.

"Just wishing I could be of more use, ma'am," he answered politely, turning to see Agent Romanoff regarding him with that cool, detached smile she wore around him. She certainly didn't seem like the type to smile much, unless the situation demanded diplomacy.

The smile twitched slightly. "You don't need to call me ma'am. Agent Romanoff is fine."

"Well, Agent Romanoff, is there anything I can help with?"

She gave him a knowing smile and whispered conspiratorially, "No matter how long you avoid him, he _will_ get you to sign those cards. He has his ways."

Steve glanced up at Agent Coulson. Coulson beamed back.

"Maybe. But I've had some practice with evasion."

Romanoff laughed, but this too sounded more professional than genuine. Steve, uncomfortable with the small talk that seemed almost a burden to his companion, steered the conversation to a mission-relevant topic.

"So I've gathered we don't have much on this Loki fellow, but what can you tell me about the two SHIELD assets he took with him?"

Romanoff's placid face seemed to waver for a minute, before her expression turned blank and inscrutable. "Dr. Selvig is a renowned astrophysicist, previously employed as a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Culver University. SHIELD was impressed by his work in the field of thermonuclear astrophysics and recruited him to work on Phase One of Project PEGASUS. There's no record of previous interactions with the Hostile, but he is known to have a relationship with the Hostile's brother." All this was recited in a clinical, objective voice, as though Romanoff had briefed others on the situation many times before.

"The Hostile's brother? Is he someone we need to worry about?"

Another thin, dispassionate smile. "Our sources indicate he's not a threat, but in any case, we have no means of contacting him or even tracking his location. Suffice it to say that we have bigger issues to deal with, Captain."

Steve pondered this – specifically lingering over the mention of Project PEGASUS, which he'd never heard mentions of – for a moment before returning to his original question. "And what about the other one? The rogue agent – Agent Barton?"

Romanoff's face changed again – Steve could only describe it as going black. He wouldn't have been surprised to see thunderclouds roll across her brow or lightning shoot from her eyes. "Agent Barton has not _gone rogue_. He has, against his will, been compromised and rendered incapable of making conscious decisions. I would prefer if, in the future, you would refrain from casting aspersions on his character. Agent Barton is a loyal member to SHIELD and one of our most valuable assets, Captain. You'd do well to remember that."

And without a backwards glance, she strode away.

Steve hadn't thought much about it, at the time; in fact, he didn't think about it at all until all heck really broke loose on the ship – the engines were blasted, Coulson was killed, Loki escaped, and Barton was captured.

He had been wandering the Helicarrier, trying to avoid his guilt over Coulson's heroic demise by helping with any clean-up he could, when he happened upon Agent Romanoff confronting the guards outside Barton's cell. It seemed to be an argument that the Black Widow was winning.

"Stop talking. I'm telling you I will be here to watch over him. You think I can't handle myself? Think carefully before you answer that – there's already enough wounded on this ship. Need I remind you who knocked him unconscious in the first place?"

Eventually, the guards relented, leaving their post at Barton's door to help out with the rest of the repairs. Steve caught up to her before she could slip inside the room.

"Agent Romanoff!"

She turned, her expression murderous, her fists curling in preparation for another fight. She barely relaxed when she noticed it was Steve.

"Yes, Captain?" she asked, and underneath the clipped and, frankly, agitated bite of her voice, Steve could hear other emotions. Concern. Exhaustion. And something else – something more raw and painful. Steve couldn't decide if it was fear or hope. Maybe a little of both.

"How's he doing?" he asked, his voice automatically softening at the subtle distress in hers.

Romanoff bit her lip and her eyes twitched towards the door. "Not sure. He hasn't woken up yet."

"Are you sure it's safe?" Steve asked, already knowing that trying to stop her from entering was about as safe as picking a fight with a mountain lion.

Some sliver of emotion crossed her face, like a cloud across the moon – a shred of humanity, of vulnerability, as ephemeral as a shadow. It was gone before Steve had time to blink.

"He…he _recognized_ me, Captain. I think – I think whatever Loki did to him, he's better now. He's back to my Clint."

So he nodded and she nodded back before slipping quietly into the room. Steve was halfway down the hall before the full impact of her words hit him: _my Clint_. He frowned, considering, and almost turned around when Stark rounded the corner at the end of the hallway, sans Iron Man suit. "Fury needs to see us."

Needless to say, in the events that followed, Steve barely had time to breathe, let alone question the relationship between the Hawk and the Widow.

He did ask about it, though. When all was said and done, when alien remains were being swept off the street by little old shopkeepers and the New Yorkers were back to their usual blasé, unruffled routines (which Steve loved about the city-dwellers: they were a hardy people, indeed), the team stumbled into possibly the only still-functioning restaurant in the city. They dug into complimentary plates of something called shawarma while the owners attempted to fix the section of ceiling that had fallen down.

Natasha and Clint were sitting close together, Steve's tired mind noted, but it wasn't until he got up to help the poor Arab man steady his ladder that he noticed Clint's leg propped up on Natasha's chair.

So, when the Avengers (if that was supposed to be their name, and honestly, Steve thought it had a nice ring to it) started to drift their separate ways for the night, he inconspicuously pulled Natasha aside. Steve wouldn't call them BFFs or anything – or bros or dudes or whatever people said these days – but he certainly felt closer to his teammates now than he had before. Natasha, in particular, seemed to sympathize with his culture shock the most, having been raised under a communist regime where the word "America" just represented an impossible dream. Though her English was impeccable, she too often had trouble adapting to new slang, and she'd yet to comment on what Tony called his "appalling lack of knowledge about civilized culture."

Whatever the reason, he found that she tolerated him much better than she did Tony, who only seemed to aggravate her, or Bruce, who maybe scared her a little, or even Thor, whom she regarded with the sort of warm affection one bestows on a shaggy, muscular puppy. He was fairly certain she wouldn't even punch him for asking about her personal life.

"Not to pry, but…what _is_ your relationship with Agent Barton? You two seem awfully close."

Natasha gave him her enigmatic smile, which he was quickly coming to realize was something of a trademark for her. "We're partners, Captain."

"So you're not, uh…in love?" Steve had truly been meaning to ask if they were in any kind of physical relationship, really he had. But, as it turns out, even with 70 years to mature emotionally, Steve still couldn't look a lady in the eye and talk about…well…

_Intimate relationships_. The very thought made him blush.

"Have you ever been in love, Captain?" Natasha asked, her eyes gleaming knowingly. She'd obviously picked up on his discomfort.

"I don't know," Steve answered honestly, because despite his feelings for Peggy, did he really even know what the word meant? He'd never felt that way about anyone before, and his time with her had been far too short to explore all the nuances of the emotion.

Natasha nodded thoughtfully. "Let me tell you something. Love is wanting to be with someone, all the time, to breathe the same air and share their laughter and feel the warmth of their hand in yours and know that you'll never have to let it go. Love is little blue houses with white picket fences, and big white weddings that lead to little bright-eyed babies running around your heart. Love is having a home a hearth to come back to. It's growing old with someone, so that even your memories are something you share. Love is certainty. It's a dream come true.

"What Clint and I have isn't a dream: it's stone-cold reality. It's uncertain and chaotic and it's going to bed knowing you could wake up to a world where the other doesn't exist, bleeding out in some country in the ass-end of the world, taken out by a stray bullet on the job. It's wanting him to be happy, to the exclusion of pretty much anyone else. If he wants to date another woman, hell, if he wants to date another _man_, I'd wish them luck with a smile because I only want to ensure that he has one point of joy in his shitty life. It's painful as fuck sometimes, yes, but it's also the only real thing I've ever had in my life. Love is for children, and Clint and I – well, we never had much of a childhood."

It's the longest speech Steve has ever heard her give, and he thinks she might have waxed on even longer, only Clint is getting impatient waiting for her, still edgy after all that's happened, and he calls out, "You ready to go, Nat?"

So Natasha just gifts Steve with another little smile and walks away, as though she hadn't just blown open a door to her mind for Steve to walk through – as though she hasn't just given him a little piece of herself.

And maybe the world's irrevocably changed, for better or for worse, by this technological revolution. Maybe gods and monsters do exist, and aliens lurk outside the pages of sci-fi novels. Maybe Steve's life will never go back to the calm, placid peace he enjoyed before the war. Maybe it's all different now.

But there's one thing that Steve knows will never change: love is love, no matter what you want to call it. And sure, frat regs are the same as they've always been, but –

Well, Steve thinks, it's really no one's business but Clint and Natasha's, right?

**A/N: Just a few side note things - If Steve switches back between Natasha and Clint's various names, it's only to reflect his relationship with them at the time of recollection (for example, the other SHIELD agents would call them by their code names when telling Steve about them). Also, Google has told me that shawarma can be Greek or Arabic - I went with Arabic. I love Steve/Natasha friendship (have you guys seen the CA 2 trailer yet? So cute) and while I don't necessarily think Thor is dumb...it's kind of fun to write him as though he is, so Thor fans, don't hate me for the muscley puppy comment. See you in the reviews!**


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